Study sees racial bias in traffic-stop searches

July 25, 2008|By Monique Garcia and Ray Long, TRIBUNE REPORTERS

Civil rights groups called Thursday for ending the state police practice of searching vehicles during routine traffic stops, citing new statistics that show black and Hispanic motorists are searched more often even though drugs or other illegal items turn up more frequently among white drivers.

In a letter to Gov. Rod Blagojevich, the groups said the state-funded research shows that minorities are unfairly singled out by police departments around the state. They called on him to order the Illinois State Police to end "consent searches," in which drivers agree to open their cars for inspection.

"Now we have the proof in the pudding and that is that not only are [these searches] occurring with greater frequency among minority drivers, but that they are occurring with dramatically less effectiveness," said Harvey Grossman, legal director for the ACLU of Illinois.

Although similar reports have for the last several years revealed that minorities are stopped and searched at higher rates than whites, last year was the first time police agencies were required to disclose their "hit rate," or how often the searches turn up drugs, weapons, stolen goods or other "contraband."

The Democratic governor said in a statement that he opposed "any unjustified differential treatment of any group," but did not address the request to stop the searches. "I look forward to working with the coalition to further our shared goals," Blagojevich said.

The state police called the proposed ban a "drastic step" and said it was premature given that the latest numbers are part of a yearslong study into potential discrimination that won't end until 2010.

"Biased-based policing is unacceptable and will not be practiced or tolerated by the ISP," Director Larry Trent said in a statement.

The study, required under racial-profiling legislation sponsored by then state Sen. Barack Obama of Chicago, is being conducted by the Northwestern University Center for Public Safety based on numbers reported to the state by police agencies around Illinois.

The 2007 statewide data show that compared with whites, police agencies searched blacks three times more often and Hispanics more than twice as often. But police discovered illicit goods roughly twice as often when whites agreed to searches.

The civil rights groups singled out the numbers for the state police, which showed troopers searched minorities three times as often as whites. But troopers found contraband in the vehicles of white motorists almost twice as often as they did in the vehicles of blacks and eight times more often than the vehicles of Hispanics.

"Officers are more trusting of whites than they are of blacks, and they are particularly suspicious of Hispanics," Grossman said of state police. "It's clear from the data that officers require less certainty when they ask Latinos to be searched than they do whites, there are more stringent standards for whites."

The report also contradicted a 2005 state-sponsored study that found minority drivers are more likely to agree to voluntary searches than whites -- one possible explanation for why they are more often searched.

Agencies were also required for the first time in 2007 to track how often motorists refuse consent searches. The refusal rates were almost equal among whites and minorities, with whites agreeing to searches 91 percent of the time; and blacks and Hispanics agreeing to 90 percent of requests.

The actual number of consent searches conducted was small -- less than 1 percent, or slightly more than 23,000, of the more than 2.4 million traffic stops conducted in the state last year. Just more than 18 percent of the searches found contraband.

Other groups joining in the letter to Blagojevich with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois included Rainbow/PUSH, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Illinois conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

State lawmakers, including several with law enforcement backgrounds, were quick to defend consent searches.

Rep. Edward Acevedo (D-Chicago), on leave from the Chicago Police Department, said the consent searches "should still be allowed."

"Sometimes you have to perform a search when there is immediate danger," Acevedo said.

Sen. John Millner (R-Carol Stream), a former Elmhurst police chief and officer for 31 years, said it's important for officers to have discretion and gave the example of an officer noticing a person was unusually nervous during a stop. He maintained state police are "absolutely not" making stops or conducting searches based on race.